BOOK REVIEW: What She Ate by Laura Shapiro

Laura Shapiro is a journalist/food historian whose latest book, What She Ate, is a culinary biography of six very different women. Shapiro looks at the lives of Dorothy Wordsworth, Rosa Lewis, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun, Barbara Pym, and Helen Gurley Brown by examining their writings and what is written about them to see how food and cooking influenced their lives and work. The premise is that we can better understand these women by understanding their relationship to food. It’s a unique presentation, written in clear, sympathetic prose. I’d never heard of Dorothy Wordsworth or Rosa Lewis, so their chapters were particularly interesting.

As biographies, the short chapters are merely introductions, but the approach taken by Shapiro manages to pack a lot of information into small packages. And she succeeds in showing the centrality of food–cooking it, eating it, and writing about it– for each of the women. An enjoyable read!